The first cracks in the story appeared four days after Christmas, not in the United Kingdom but in Denmark, where a local newspaper carried an intriguing report about a mysterious explosion at a summer cottage along the North Sea. The Danish police had originally said the cottage was unoccupied, but a local paramedic, speaking on condition of anonymity, disputed that claim, saying he had personally seen three bodies removed from the charred rubble. The paramedic also claimed to have treated a German-speaking man for superficial facial wounds. Lars Mortensen, chief of the Danish Security Intelligence Service, appeared before a hastily convened news conference in Copenhagen and confirmed that, yes, there were indeed three people killed in the incident and, yes, it was linked to the search for Elizabeth Halton. Mortensen then declared he would have nothing else to say about the matter until a formal investigation had been carried out.

The next crack in the official version of events came two days later in Amsterdam, where an Egyptian woman of late middle age appeared at a press conference and confirmed that one of the people killed in northern Denmark had been her husband, Ibrahim Fawaz. Speaking in Arabic through an interpreter, Mrs. Fawaz said that she had been informed by American officials that her husband had been working on their behalf and had perished during a failed attempt to rescue Miss Halton. She also said that all attempts to reach her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson in Copenhagen had been unsuccessful. Her left-leaning lawyers speculated that Ibrahim Fawaz had been kidnapped by American agents and coerced into working on the CIA’s behalf. They called on the Dutch justice minister to order an investigation of the matter and the minister did so at four that afternoon, promising that it would be full and unflinching.

The next morning in London, a Home Office spokesman confirmed that the son of Ibrahim Fawaz had been one of two terrorists found dead in a bomb-laden transit van that crashed into a field in Essex shortly after dawn on Christmas morning. The spokesman also confirmed that Fawaz the younger had been shot several times in the leg and that the driver of the van, as yet still unidentified, had been fatally shot in the head. Who had inflicted the wounds, and precisely what had transpired in Essex, was not yet known, though British investigators were operating under the assumption that a second attack had been planned for Christmas morning and that it had somehow gone awry.